


An Echo of Her Doctor (So Close and Yet Not)

by Rinari7



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Rose Tyler, Alternate TARDIS, Dimension-Hopping Rose, F/M, Gen, Lost Socks, Parallel Universes, Rose saves the Doctor, Slightly shippy but I think can also be read as gen, alternate ninth doctor - Freeform, just because, somewhat angsty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-12
Updated: 2017-09-12
Packaged: 2018-12-26 22:54:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12068634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rinari7/pseuds/Rinari7
Summary: There's a TARDIS here, and a Doctor, a Doctor she knows even — but notherTARDIS and notherDoctor. Still, she could never not run to his rescue.





	An Echo of Her Doctor (So Close and Yet Not)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pellaaearien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pellaaearien/gifts).



> Prompted on Tumblr for my 100 followers milestone by the lovely pellaaearien, the Doctor needing rescuing by Rose or dimension-hopping Rose running into Nine. She got both. ;)
> 
> Also, I suck majorly at coming up with titles.

Rose stiffened the moment she landed, the low hum of a TARDIS piercing her mind and hope blossoming in her bones. The wolf in her started with interest, nose to the air — but no, this wasn’t her. A sibling, one from the same coral even, maybe, as it chirruped with glee at her presence, but it wasn’t the same TARDIS who had left Rose with a sliver of her heart.

Disappointment was so familiar she was nearly numb to it now, and as its tendrils snaked around her heart she felt barely any colder. Rose just shoved her hands into her pockets, brushing the dimension jumper (29 minutes, 51 seconds, 50 seconds…) turned away, and started walking.

In someone’s garden nearby a dog yapped; a cat shot out from the hedge and raced in front of her across the sleepy suburban street to disappear into the bushes on the other side. This TARDIS reached for her mind, brushed against it, tried to nudge her to the right. Wrinkling her brow, she complied, though her steps were slow. The Doctor wasn’t the only Time Lord or Lady in some universes; the Master was a particularly nasty character she’d had a few run-ins with, and then there was the Dreamer and the Inventor and the Mathematician…  _Who pilots you?_

A familiar face flashed through her mind, big ears and chiseled cheekbones, black leather and piercing blue eyes, and she caught her breath and started to run.

Rows of neat white houses and tiny gardens soon gave way to taller towers of brick and concrete. Rose threaded her way among shoppers, wrinkling her brow as everything became more familiar-yet-not, and slowed to a stop as she recognized the edge of the Powell Estate.  _I shouldn’t be here._

The TARDIS nudged her again, hard, almost a shove, towards the apartment she knew as Ms. Naomi’s. Thank goodness Ms. Naomi was still doing her community service hours at the dog shelter at this time most days — if Rose’s knowledge still applied here. She wasn’t sure it did.

The door was slightly open, just a crack, and she nudged it wider with her toe, peering inside. The flat was laid out exactly like her mum’s, she was relieved to notice. At least that much was the same.

“Hello?” she called out, peering around the corners, her hand now almost automatically hovering over her small Torchwood-issue blaster. The slight presence of the TARDIS in her head had gone strangely silent.

A grunt came from the kitchen, then a crash, glass shattering and skittering across tile. Rose sprinted to the kitchen, curling her hand around the doorjamb to redirect her momentum around the corner, and reached for her sidearm.

The wolf in her recoiled immediately from the room, the telepathic equivalent of high-pitched screeching filling her senses, enough to make her ears want to bleed. Rose stumbled back a step, grimacing, reaching for the wall to steady herself. With a deep breath, then another, she pulled herself together, blotting out the piercing cacophony as best she could.

The Doctor was curled up on the floor, his hands covering his ears, bucking and writhing — she didn’t want to imagine the pain he was in, if she had been thusly affected — surrounded by a circle of… socks. Socks of every size and color, hopping in unison, with a mass of translucent, nearly transparent tentacles emerging from the end, the equally invisible eyestalks curling out and up recognizable by the shock of purple eyeballs against the tile floor. Fillangers.

Rose scowled, but the solution was easy enough — discovered by accident by Mickey on one of their first missions together. With a quick mental apology to the Davidsons downstairs, she stomped on the floor, as hard as she could, in counterpoint to their rhythm. Their dance floundered, a few of them trying to jump again in midair, and the noise began to fade.

Rose continued to stomp, with no rhyme or rhythm to it, and the small creatures scattered in confusion, skittering away to hide in whatever crevice they could find, some even squeezing their boneless bodies into the refrigerator ventilation.

“Doctor!” Rose practically fell to her knees beside him. He turned, to stare at her, surprise, gratitude, wariness flashing across his oh-so-familiar features she could still read like an open book.  _Blimey_ , she’d missed him.

The low hum of the aliens’ signals to one another flared up in her head, and she grimaced, mirroring his own features twisted in discomfort as he sat up. They didn’t have long before the little devils would reorganize. “We have to go, now.”

On instinct she reached for his hand. As her fingers curled around his, some spark jumped between them — her wolf sat up and howled — and she suddenly remembered that this Doctor probably didn’t even know her. His stare turned from shock to bewilderment — then to pain as the silent noise became louder again still. Rose stood, pulling him to his feet with her. “Run!”

They did, out of the kitchen, into the hall, down the stairs, across the paved courtyard, until her heart was pounding and she was panting — far less than she had on that first sprint with him, mind you — and she couldn’t keep a smile off her face. “Just like we used to,” nearly crossed her lips, and she bit the words back as she turned to face him, the sight of his wrinkled brow quickly sobering her.

The TARDIS whistled happily in her head, relief and pride abounding in every tone, but for now, she paid it no mind, her focus entirely on the Doctor, on his piercing blue stare. She dropped his hand — he tightened his grip, for a split second, almost reflexively, before slowly letting her fingers go.

“My ship sent you to rescue me?” His tone was hard, almost abrasive. This him she remembered, though it hurt more than it really should have, to have it directed at her.

Rose tilted her head, tossing a stray lock of hair over her shoulder and shoving her thumbs through her belt loops, suddenly aware of how far she was from that girl he rescued once, and still so close. “Seems like you needed rescuing.”

He nodded and shifted his weight to the other foot, clearing his throat. “Right. Thank you for that. Most unpleasant, that was.” Somehow he didn’t sound very grateful, and  _“Might die in the process, but don’t worry about me,”_  echoed in her head.

She swallowed heavily. “You’re welcome.” Rose emphasized the words.

His gaze turned wary again. “Who are you? You’re not one of those bloody Time Agents, are you, mucking up the timelines?”

“Not exactly.” She suddenly wanted to laugh, wanted to cry — not the first time her feelings had flooded over her on meeting a parallel doctor. A calming breath, an inner debate flickering high in her over what to tell him, and what not to. For a moment, she contemplated revealing it all, the stars going out, how the universe needed him — because he was still somehow the Doctor, wasn’t he? He could still help and she’d been searching for so long, and if finding not-her-Doctor did this to her, what would finding her Doctor do, what would finding  _her_ Doctor do to her if she had to let him go yet again?

But the wolf in her whispered  _no_ , it must be  _her_  Doctor, and she wouldn’t have to ever let him go again — and if Rose believed in anything, it was in her Doctor. So she settled on telling this Doctor the most important thing.

She offered him a smile, her Doctor’s smile, because she couldn’t resist giving him that much. He blinked, drawing in a breath, an answering smile spreading across his face, without his intention, she suspected, and it made her grin harder. “My name’s Rose.”

Then she caught sight of someone over his shoulder and stilled, for one heartbeat, two, choking on her words, ice rushing along her nerves as her own face stared back at her, eyes wide.

He began to turn as well, shock and alarm crossing his expression as he saw this universe’s Rose Tyler. Rose swallowed, tilting her head towards her counterpart. “Now forget me, Doctor.”

She didn’t stay to watch him look between the pair of them, didn’t stay to watch her start running after herself, then stop, staring at the Doctor instead, didn’t stay to watch him start after her himself, then turn to other her and ask her, in his usual brusque way, what her name was.

Rose just shoved her hands into her pockets, brushing the dimension jumper (19 minutes, 51 seconds, 50 seconds…), turned away, and started walking.


End file.
